NEW YORK – With the goal of mapping people’s social relationships, the National Security Agency is secretly collecting information on Americans from a previously unknown array of public and commercial sources, according to a report today from The New York Times. The data sources include “bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data,” the article said.

This report confirms what whistleblowers have been saying for years: the NSA has been monitoring virtually every aspect of Americans' lives – their communications, their associations, even their locations. The NSA apparently believes it can conduct this surveillance because 30 years ago the Supreme Court upheld the government’s warrantless collection of basic information about a criminal suspect's telephone calls over the course of a single day. But the claim that this narrow case from the analog era authorizes the mass surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans is outlandish. That the NSA’s surveillance activities rest on so flimsy a foundation is further evidence that our intelligence-oversight system is utterly broken.